_Running and writing parallel each other: we start off slowly, not knowing where we're going, wanting to stop after a few minutes, but refusing to give in to our more base quitting instincts, and we keep going and keep going convinced that after a while it will become fun, until our momentum takes over, and before we know it, we're lost in the woods or much further out than we anticipated, having lost track of time and thought and distance and pace--which is the exact moment it becomes fun as we've stopped thinking about how much fun we aren't having and think about whatever we're thinking about instead--and the only way to finish is to keep going. (I should explore this symbiosis further at some point.)It has always been my intention with this blog to occasionally discuss running. I haven't done so.

With this post I am changing that. I decided a year ago to run a marathon in 2012. Earlier this summer I broke my foot, which put my training a little behind schedule. But, as of three weeks ago, I went for an extremely slow 2 mile loop, and have three times since dusted off the Asics, stretched and ignored the creaky whining of my hamstrings, and absorbed the quizzical looks of my roommate when I jog down the steps at 10pm. I still intend to run a marathon in 2012. Darren Rome Leo, at his blog Thoughtvomit, recently posted about the soundtrack for his novel's protagonist. It is a common question on writer's forums whether we write to music or not and, if we do, what we listen to when writing. This same question is applied to runners.The songs listed below are the songs I most often go running to and will be listening to a lot of over the next year or so.What are yours?

Author

Darren Cormier lives in the Boston area. He is the author of A Little Soul: 140 Twitterstories. His fiction has appeared in Opium Magazine, Meetinghouse, Amoskeag, Every Day Fiction, Raft Magazine, Arch Literary Journal, and One Forty Fiction, Ether Books, and Seedpod Publishing. Writing peeves: there should be a comma before the "and" in a set of three or more items; it is "A historic" not "AN historic"--the 'h' is pronounced; would've, could've, and should've are contractions and should never be written as "would of," "could of," or "should of"; and "ATM machine" is redundant.He also invented the giraffe.